Kamala Harris is funny, but what about her politics?

As someone with a memory span of longer than four years, the notion that Kamala Harris is “Brat” – as put forward by Charli xcx in a tweet yesterday (July 22) – is a perplexing one. When Harris first became a major figure in US politics, during the 2019 Democratic primaries, the overwhelming consensus among young people was that she was a cop. It’s not that everyone hated her: she enjoyed a cult of personality from the moment she entered the national stage and her fanbase – known as the K Hive – have continued to be as fiercely loyal (and occasionally as toxic) as that of any popstar. But her support base was typically older and more centrist. For almost everyone under 35 with left-leaning politics, she was not a wacky aunt with an infectious laugh and a generous Xanax prescription, but a cynical and untrustworthy political figure.

Rising to prominence in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, at a time when police abolition was gaining potency as a political demand, it’s no surprise that Kamala was greeted with suspicion. As a public prosecutor in California, she opposed legislation which would make police body cameras mandatory across the state, declined to investigate a number of high-profile police shootings, oversaw an increase of the prison population, had the parents of children with serious health problems arrested for truancy, and incarcerated 1,500 people for cannabis offences (which wasn’t very “brat”.) As a primary candidate, she was seen as someone who attempted to capitalise on the popularity of Bernie Sanders by endorsing his signature policies at the level of rhetoric while, in practice, working to protect corporate interests and maintain the status quo. During the primaries, her ludicrously convoluted plan to tackle student debt (which she would forgive, but only for “Pell Grant recipients who start a business that operates for three years in disadvantaged communities”) was so widely mocked it became a symbol for a certain strain of ineffectual liberal politics.

But after she became Vice President, something shifted. Kamala’s public image began to soften. People stopped posting videos of her bragging about locking people up, and instead started sharing the clip where she sings an atonal version of Wheels on the Bus before bursting into peals of manic laughter. Although it was clear that people were laughing at her, a note of affection began creeping in. Even though I began to suspect that the deluge of Kamala memes was the result of an elaborate psyop orchestrated by the CIA, I couldn’t help but get sucked in. There was something infectious about her incessant chuckling, her deranged enthusiasm for the everyday. I found her rambling, surreal and often incoherent speaking style to be endearing – maybe I had been suffering under the delusion that I fell out of a coconut tree, instead of existing in the context of all in which I live and all that came before me! It occurred to me that splitting a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc with her would not be an unpleasant way to spend an afternoon.

In the weeks leading up to Biden dropping out, Kamala-posting reached a fever pitch (although the K-Hive itself did not approve) – it became increasingly unclear what level of irony people were operating on when they posted described themselves as “coconut-pilled” or posted fan-cams set to Charli xcx songs. For the most part, it was neither entirely ironic nor entirely sincere, but a mixture of both: people wanted her to replace Joe Biden and believed she stood a better chance of beating Trump, but that didn’t mean they were wholeheartedly endorsing her as an individual or the politics she represents. The almost unanimous backlash to Charli’s “Kamala IS brat” tweet – when thousands of people rose up to insist “oh, no, we don’t like her like that” – suggests that the internet’s affection for Harris is not entirely in earnest. Faced with yet another imperative to vote for the lesser of two evils, it’s hard to begrudge anyone – particularly anyone who actually lives in the US – for deriving some nihilistic pleasure out of this depressing state of affairs. It’s fine to laugh at things that are funny.

But equally, no one deserves to be scolded for objecting to the Kamala hype train. You can find her personally endearing, but there’s no getting around the fact that – as a senior figure within the Biden administration – she is complicit in the deaths of tens of thousands of people in Gaza. Pundits have speculated that Kamala will adopt a more pro-Palestine stance than her predecessor (which wouldn’t be hard), but we should believe that when we see it. If you take seriously the idea that Israel is carrying out a genocide, or even that it has committed a series of war crimes, which is at this point beyond debate, the image of Kamala as a zany, fun-loving goofball becomes harder to stomach. I am sympathetic to the argument that turning her into a meme – even in a spirit of sarcasm – helps to whitewash her complicity in some of the gravest atrocities ever committed with the backing of the American state. If you remove Kamala’s politics from the equation, she may be charming and likeable, but you can’t do that: she is a politician. Her public record is far more relevant than her personal affect, and it is – almost across the board – a bad one. She would still be better than Trump.

Maybe the boundary between laughing at and laughing with is too porous, too easily manipulated, to be maintained. But we won’t have to worry about that particular problem for much longer. Kamala as a meme object has now reached such a saturation point that the writing is on the wall. Like “Dark Brandon” before it – an online joke which became a major feature of Biden’s campaign – it’s inevitable that Harris’s team will try to join in the fun and kill it stone dead – once you can buy a ‘coconut tree’ themed water bottle on her official website, it’s over. When that sad day comes, we’ll just have to find a new terrible centrist politician to start stanning: Yvette Cooper Autumn is about to go crazy.